Film Criticism

Film As Film: Understanding And Judging Movies

Film As Film: Understanding And Judging Movies

V. F. Perkins

Language: English

Pages: 208

ISBN: 0306805413

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Here at last is an introduction to film theory and its history without the jargon. Noted film scholar V. F. Perkins presents criteria for expanding our understanding and enjoyment of movies. He employs common sense words like balance, coherence, significance, and satisfaction to develop his insightful support of the subtle approach and of the unobtrusive director. Readers will learn why a scene from the humbler movie Carmen Jones is a deeper realization of filmmaking than the bravura lion sequence in the classic Battleship Potemkin. Along the way Perkins invites readers to re-experience with clarity, directness, and simplicity other famous scenes by directors like Hitchcock, Eisenstein, and Chaplin. Perkins examines the origins of movies and embraces their use of both realism and magic, their ability to record as well as to create. In the process he seeks to discover the synthesis between these opposing elements. With the delight of the fan and the perception of the critic, Perkins advances a film theory, based on the work of Bazin and other early film theorists, that is rich with suggestion for debate and further pursuit. Sit beside Perkins as he reacquaints you with cinema, heightens your awareness, deepens your pleasure, and increases your return every time you invest in a movie ticket.

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Amour and Michelangelo Antonioni's L’Avvenrura o'ered carrion to the culture-vulture as rich and ripe as any provided by painting, music or literature. Of course, British universities have yet to recogniu the signicance of the cinema as an area of study. But even this failure seems the product of lethargy rather than scorn. With the achievements of the lm-maker now celebrated in the press, analysed in specialist journals, and embalmed in archives throughout the world, we can do what Amheirn hoped

persistence of vision as a necessary substitute for the eonjurer's sleight of hand. In both cases, the quickness of the movement deceives the eye. The projector's magic is fundamental to the movie's mechanical nature and should not be given less weight than the camera's special relationship with reality. Whenever we talk of the movie's realism we are discussing its artice as well. It is possible to see the camera as no more than the most convenient machine that exists to produce the kinds and

uncontrolled nature of the experiment (how expectant, cooperative or discriminating was this audience?) it remains annoyingly specious to claim that shot one, ‘man's face‘, plus shot two, ‘woman in coin‘, creates a new idea, ‘man in grief‘. We could expect the same idea to be communicable in a single shot of both man and corpse. Editing simply reinstates what was removed in the initial act of creation and selection, as Pudovkin conrms: ‘we chose close-ups which were static and which did not

entirely physical; it corresponded also to a psychological-emotional enclosure. Hitchcock's achievement here represents as well as may be the achievement ol‘ any ne lm-maker working at his peak. He does not let us know whether he is nding the style to suit his subject or has found the subject which allows him best exercise of his style. He builds towards situations in which the most eloquent use of his medium cannot emerge as bombast. At the level of detail we can value most the moments when

shaped and moulded so as to become signicant. I-{is argument betrays the basic inadequacy of established theory: ‘action’ is equated with ‘mere reality’, since it is treated as ifit existed outside the area of control. A similar attitude applied to writing would equate the novel with jom'nalism. The orthodox theorists have been unable to formulate criteria which take account of the dierence between reality and ction. Systematically emphasizing the cinema's properties as a visual medium, their

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